DOT Needs Greater Oversight of TIGER Program, IG Says

This story appears in the Oct. 1 print edition of Transport Topics.

Stronger oversight and better assessments are needed to determine if the TIGER grant program is producing its expected benefits, a report from the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General said.

Grants from TIGER, or the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery program, were among the popular items to grow out of President Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus package.

The competitive grant program is used for highway, bridge, public transportation, rail improvements and port infrastructure.

Funding for the program, which started at $1.5 billion, has since been increased to a total of $3.1 billion, so it is important that the U.S. Department of Transportation “take timely actions to make oversight improvements,” the Sept. 20 report said.

At the same time, the report noted that the TIGER program had to be put together in a year and that the secretary’s office developed “policies that generally adhered to best practices for grant management.”

As part of the report, OIG did an “in-depth review” on 14 local government transportation projects funded with TIGER money, and concluded that about one-third had “unclear project milestones and scopes of work, which hinder [DOT’s] ability to hold grantees accountable for meeting milestones and achieving expected results.”

For example, the report said it found conflicting progress milestones in documents related to a rail improvement project in Gulfport, Miss., a bicycle and pedestrian project in Indianapolis and the building of a pier in Quonset, R.I.

For a highway bypass at the Arkansas and Missouri state line, the grant agreement did not specify which elements the TIGER funds would pay for, “even though TIGER program policy requires that grantees outline the sources and uses of all project funds,” the report said.

Unlike most DOT programs, TIGER funding is not apportioned to state and local governments according to formulas. Instead, state and local governments submit grant applications for specific projects and DOT determines which will receive funding.

“The goals of the TIGER program are to create and preserve jobs, promote economic recovery, and invest in infrastructure that has long-term economic benefits,” the OIG report said.

However, 42 of the 53 performance measures contained in the TIGER grant agreements are not “outcome-based,” thereby limiting DOT’s “ability to describe the extent to which projects achieved expected benefits,” said the report.

Justin Nisly, spokesman for Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, said the report “echoes the support Congress has repeatedly demonstrated for our TIGER program, noting the efficiency and accountability with which DOT developed the program in particular.”

With each new round of TIGER grants, DOT “has improved the . . . award and oversight processes and will continually refine the program going forward,” Nisly said.

When TIGER was first announced, DOT received more than 1,400 grant applications but had money to fund only 51 projects. The program was so popular among state and local governments, however, that between 2010 and 2012, Congress funded three more rounds of grant making totaling $3.1 billion.

Inside DOT, the report said, LaHood’s office administers the grant program, but day-to-day oversight is assigned to four operating administrations: the Federal Highway Administration, the Federal Railroad Administration, the Federal Transit Administration and the Maritime Administration.

The secretary’s office “lacks a formal process for documenting decisions and ensuring follow-up on corrective actions” carried out by the four departments, the inspector general’s report said.

In addition, the four administrations “differed in their approach, experience, and capability to oversee the TIGER grantees and projects,” the report said.

While FHWA and FTA had “fully developed grant management policies” when they began overseeing TIGER projects, FRA and MARAD only recently established such policies and are still working to implement them, the report said.

TIGER put a new emphasis on “the selection of projects with intermodal benefits” but the inspector general report said FHWA and FRA did not “fully coordinate” to make use of FRA’s experience and technical expertise on rail projects.

“Neither agency provided evidence of ongoing coordination on technical issues related to project design and construction monitoring,” the report said. “FRA’s limited involvement increases the risk of grantees not complying with safety and other rail standards, potentially resulting in a need for costly and disruptive corrective actions.”

In a response contained in the report, DOT’s Acting Undersecretary for Policy Polly Trottenberg said, “Creating an innovative multimodal transportation grant program on a very tight timeline was an extraordinary challenge. We are pleased with the OIG draft report’s recognition that the TIGER program generally adhered to best practices in grant management.”

She added: “We intend to make good use of the information in the OIG report as we continue to administer the TIGER program.”